Waking up

~



The most precious

The most precious,

is

The Union
between

what is happening
in my experience
right now

and

my capacity to
love it
completely -

to cherish it,

to prize it beyond

Anything else.

To value
my life.



~

Coming home to be healed

Amma came to me last night.  I don’t mean that she came in a dream by some sort of astral travel, if that’s the sort of thing she’s prone to do, but more that (at 3am today) I had a palpable sense of who she is and what she offers, and it opened my heart.  More importantly, I had a sense that it is something that is a potential in me, you and in everyone.  It was a profound experience and I want to share it with you.

It’s not really important for you to like or even know Amma for the purpose of this story.  Her role in proceedings here is metaphorical.  But in order to understand what I have to share it might help for you to have some idea who she is and what she does, if you haven’t met her yet yourself.

Amma is a large jolly looking Indian woman who hugs people.  Lots of people.  She goes all around the world doing it and people queue up to be hugged by her.  Many people believe that she is a living saint - an enlightened avatar, and that her hugs have mystical and healing properties.  This is why they queue up for hours and late into the night to receive her blessing and her embrace.  They come to her to experience her love, they come to her for healing.

I’ve met her and been hugged by her on 2 occasions in the past.  Actually, the hugs were not life changing experiences for me.  Frankly, I’ve had better hugs from the people I love and more transformative esoteric energetic experiences from other beings and teachers.  There is no denying, however, that the feeling of the room when you are sitting there with her and the other participants is a delightful one and it does feel to me like bathing in a sea of love.  There are many worse ways to spend a Tuesday evening, especially in Alexandra Palace.

Anyway, this story is not a discussion of Amma and her work and whether or not it is a good use of anyone’s time to seek her out for a cuddle, it’s much more about what I realised at 3am this morning and how it reminds me of what she does and what we all can do.

At 10pm yesterday I arrived back from an amazing tantra workshop with Jan Day (Living Tantra 1, since you ask) where we had spent the entire week practising saying “yes!” to all of our human experience.  Yes to the pleasure, yes to the pain, yes to our sexuality, yes to our wounding, yes to it all.  It did feel like something had started to shift in me during the workshop, that I was finally ready to start to embrace parts of my experience that in the past I had at best tolerated and at worst had actively been resisting.  I offer my deep heartfelt thanks and my gratitude to Jan for holding such a safe space for me to start this part of that journey. I sense that I will be working with her some more.

But doing it on a workshop is one thing.  Doing it in life is quite another.  And doing it at 3am in my own bed when I can’t sleep is not something I would have believed possible.  And yet it was.

I woke up at about 3am feeling intense discomfort in my body.  This is not an unfamiliar experience for me.  There are old patterns in my body (probably trauma from childhood, perhaps not) that play out at various times and whilst I’m asleep is one of their favourite times to express.  I often wake feeling internally contorted and churned up and in such physical/emotional discomfort that I’m unable to sleep.

What I usually do is try to find a way to soothe these patterns away.  Essentially finding the places that are tight and gently bringing my attention to them telling them that it’s ok for them to relax.  And they usually do, eventually.  And then I can go back to sleep.

And this is fine, up to a point.  Except it feels like a bit of a sticking plaster.  I simply relax the tense places enough for me to sleep, but the underlying patterns themselves are not addressed.  They are not addressed because I don’t really want to engage with them, to meet them and to know them.  I feel a little like a teacher who has learned to be able to calm down the children in class who are misbehaving, rather than being willing to sit down with them and really help them to work through the pain that was causing them to misbehave in the first place.

And that’s what was different last night. 

Last night when the pain came, for perhaps the first time I was willing and able to welcome it.  Not to try to soothe it away, not to try to deal with it, but simply to be genuinely curious about who had come to visit and to welcome it as a long-lost cousin from a far-away land (which in reality is not so far away at all).

The experience was incredibly moving and the response of my body was astounding.  The pain came – I said yes.  The tears came, I said yes.  My body contorted into strange shapes – I said yes.  I said welcome.

I was left after about 30 minutes feeling more relaxed than I had ever felt when I had been trying to soothe the pain away.  I felt like a little part of the pain had really been met and having really been met had been able to let go.  But even this is beside the point.  I felt that I had been really inside and celebrating my experience, even though it was a difficult one.

I was reminded of what my teacher Adam had said to me recently about the absolutely fundamental importance of really being willing to have the experience I was actually having and that when I was refusing to do so I was rejecting and devaluing my life.  I was starting to have a deeper glimpse of how it might be to really embrace all of my experience and so to be present in all of my life, celebrating it all.

I am now starting to see that there is no end-goal in life beyond this, being present in and celebrating our experience.

I was reminded of the metaphor of life as a record player that came to me recently.  (I know record players are rather old-skool now, but updating it to CD technology seems to squish the romance). Our still-conscious nature is the needle, our ever-changing experience is the vinyl.  When consciousness touches experience, there is love.  When the needle that we are as source touches the vinyl of the experience that appears and changes, we are the music that plays.

I was also reminded of something that Pamela Wilson had said when I had explored the question of pain with her.  She had said that the pain comes to you as the guru, in order to be seen and loved by you and to be set free.  I had understood what she had said at the time but had had no sense that it might actually be possible for me to do and try as I might had been able to relate in this way with my pain.  Except last night at 3am, that’s just what I did.  And it was so, so beautiful!

I was moved to pick up my pen and write some words.  These are the words that came:

Coming home to be healed.

It’s not about even allowing tension/pain to soften.

It’s about the patterns of pain coming to you, for you to love them and set them free.

Don’t ask “How can I be free from this pain?

Do ask: “Who comes to me just now for healing?”

“What is your nature?”

And then say:

“Ah!  You’re like that!”

“Yes!”

“Welcome!  Welcome just as you are!”

“There’s no need for you (the tension, the sadness, the pain) to change”

“Welcome home”

“You are loved.”

~

Ask simply: “Who comes to me next for healing?”

Sit, as Amma sits, in front of the queue of beautiful hurting pieces coming to you for a hug, and one after another love them.  Say: “Yes my child, welcome home!”.  And hug them to your chest as they sob in your arms, and the two of you cry and laugh together.

Some of them have traveled many miles to be here, as they have heard that you are a saint of extraordinary power, a living embodiment of god.  You tell them: “I don’t know about that, but you are very welcome nonetheless and I love you.  Yes, my child, it’s OK to cry, mummy’s here.  Yes, sweet one, it’s all OK”.  And rock them gently in your arms as one by one you welcome them home.

Don’t play favourites, take them into your arms in the order they come to you.

Don’t try to change them.

Don’t even try to set them free.

Just ask “who comes to me for a blessing?”

And love them one after another.

Because that’s what they need.

And because you are the only one who can.

A perfect moment

"Perfect moments" often crop up when you least expect them to.  The one that inspired the piece of writing that follows occurred on the not-especially-wonderful-but-quite-nice Manly Beach in Sydney after I'd spent 45 minutes wandering round the surf shops deciding that I couldn't find a T-shirt that I was prepared to pay the asking price of $60 for.  Not a very auspicious background for a realisation of bliss, you might think (as I did).  On this occassion we would both have been wrong...

As I sat looking out to sea, waiting vaguely for my friend to finish her shopping, a sense of complete wellbeing arose, along with some realisations that caused me to pick up my pen and my notebook, as I luxuriated in a perfect moment, in the sure knowledge that I could not hold onto it.

Of course, all moments are perfect, it's all about our relationship to reality, and that is the real subject of the little meandering poem/exploration below.  I hope you enjoy it.

~

The absolute bliss
of a perfect moment,
which is any moment
when you know
without a trace of doubt,
that all is well,
everything is as it should be,
and nothing needs to be done.

You are home.
You are home -
knowing that there is no distinction
between you and home.
You are, we are, it is
One.

From here
it seems almost incredible
that you ever believed
that there was anything wrong,
that there was a problem with life,
that you needed something
in order to be
complete.

And yet,
checking the record books,
the archives,
the Polaroids,
you realise that you've been here
many times before.

Paradise found,
has somehow,
always become
paradise lost.

The glorious holiday you took last year,
is now reduced to a collection of
fragments of fading memory,
as is every other cherished experience
you've ever had,
or ever will have.

And the joy, which was welcome
has been replaced by flatness
or discomfort,
which aren't welcome at all.

How can this be?

It is simply the experience of being
human.

It seems you have been
holding on to
the superficially plausible myth,
that a single perfect moment
can save your soul.
And it can't.

No experience is it,
and yet any experience
can be the gateway
to recovering your birthright.

To knowing yourself
as the ocean,
the wave,
the grain of sand,
and as god,
as love.

So,
how to live?
If nothing is it
and everything is it?

I shrug and admit,
that I don't know.

What I do know
is that
living will happen,
choices will be made,
and life will unfold.

And the only choice remaining
that's worth the candle
is to love it,

over and over
and over
again.

~

love

Daniel

If life appears to be a question

So, it was the last day of 2009, I had finished a session of meditative dance and there was this pain around my heart.

It was a familiar physical/emotional pain that I've known in many forms for many years. Not a sign of medical emergency, but a well-known pang that was dull and sharp all at once.

And in that moment I didn't like it. Not one bit.

The familiar questions arose to accompany the familiar pain:

Why do I feel this pain and tenderness again?

What can I do to make it go away?

What is wrong with me?

And then, as if by magic and certainly by grace there was a shift, something softened and I realised that (and this doesn't really make sense to the mind) the pain/tenderness around my heart was the answer. It wasn't a problem, it was what I was looking for. The following words arrived as I walked home through the snow and picked up my pen to write...

The pain in my heart is the answer.

The sound of my breath is the answer.

The snow melting on my tongue is the answer.

The sound of my pen writing is the answer.

The page of my notebook turning is the answer.

These words appearing are the answer.

And they would be so if they were written in Chinese...

...or indeed a language long-forgotten that no-one understands anymore.

~

If life appears to be a question
Then life if the answer.

~

Why does my heart feel tender again? Because it does.
What can I do to change it? Nothing.
What is wrong with me? Nothing.

~

There is only what's happening.
The why is not important.
"Why?" presumes that you need to understand something, which you don't. Not really.
It refers to the past with reference to the future.
It is functional.

You don't need to understand something to love it.

You don't need to know why.

You just do.

Because you are.

~

You don't surrender in order that you might get what you want.

You surrender in order that you might want what you've got.

And you don't surrender.

But surrender may happen.

~


If life appears to be a question
Then life is the answer.

With love

Daniel